Go Ogle Some Fungus

More than a few years ago — when I was in middle school, I guess — I went with my parents to a local production of A Christmas Memory, the stage play adapted from Truman Capote’s 1956 short story of the same name. My little family shared an allergy to a certain kind of sentimentality, and so there were moments during that matinee performance when we were swallowing guffaws from the third row. We almost lost it with the memorable line, “It’s fruitcake weather, Buddy!” But when we left, darned if we didn’t keep that line in heavy rotation for years and years. (We also made a lot of fruitcake – the good kind, mind you, with deep rich medjool dates and sunny glowing apricots, toasty walnuts and just the tiniest bit of batter for glue.)

Lately, I’ve come to appreciate the season that precedes fruitcake weather: fungus weather.

Lily Bear the dog and I spend a fair bit of time in Overton Park’s Old Forest, and fall is one of our many favorite times of the year for forest-romping. (Yes, many favorites. She is given to enthusiasm and does not discriminate.) In the autumn, after storm cycles, the damp earth and soaked trees grow the most remarkable gemstones of fungus. Lily stands patiently while I pause, crouch, ogle, photograph.

The range is startling, stunning: earlobe-sized and -textured growths, salmon-pink, on the side of a smooth fallen log. Frills bunched like turmeric-tinged tulle along the exposed cut of a stump. Lichen like jade and green marble tesserating the length of a fallen branch. Otherworldly. Delicate. Like coral reef on the ocean floor; like nebulae in the dark distance of space.

Unlike fruitcake, fungus is everywhere: in the air, under our feet, on the surfaces we touch. And that’s how it should be, how it must be: fungi keep our ecosystems working. They consume organic matter by draping themselves over it, then reproduce by releasing spores into the air, diffusing over vast expanses, and continuing. I’m no mycologist — just an admirer: a mycophile, I suppose — but I can tell you that fungi serve useful purposes, even the parasitic fungi that remorselessly dispatch certain trees. But for fungus, the forest would never cycle from one season to the next; it would become a trash heap buried in the debris of itself. And the wildlife would struggle, too: plenty of little critters gnaw their nutrients from fungus.

Consider this a letter of recommendation. Some morning soon, I suggest you venture into the Old Forest, and look down, between, beneath. Soon enough it will be time to stare at the leaves, resplendent in their autumn gilding. For now, it’s fungus weather. Just don’t bake any in a nice loaf pan. Definitely do not do that.